Today’s webcast features a short video containing Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s eyewitness report following her participation in the historic Belt and Road Forum in Beijing, which has unleashed optimism and opportunity around the globe. This new paradigm represents a consolidation of the fight for the new international economic order which the LaRouche movement has led for close to fifty years. Americans must demand that our nation join this new paradigm of win-win development. The decision by President Trump to leave the Paris climate agreement poses the opportunity for the United States to finally overturn the decades of reigning Malthusian ideology and once again embrace the science of economic progress and growth.

TRANSCRIPT

MATTHEW OGDEN: Good afternoon. It’s June 2, 2017. My name is Matthew Ogden, and I’m very happy to be joining you here today with our Friday evening webcast from larouchepac.com. As you can see, I am joined in the studio by my colleague Benjamin Deniston; and we’ll be presenting a bit of a discussion for you here.

I think the theme of our webcast is the United States must decisively join the New Silk Road. That is the strategically most important thing that can occur; and everything else must be seen as a subsumed feature of that goal. We had the opportunity to speak with Lyndon and Helga LaRouche about two hours ago, and we have a little bit of breaking news; some remarks from Helga Zepp-LaRouche which I’d like to just start with by reading to you. She said that the world is quickly moving in a very new direction and a new dynamic. The momentum is very clear. You take the Belt and Road Forum that just occurred two weeks ago, and then you take the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum which is occurring as we speak; obviously being hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The featured guest at this event is Prime Minister Modi from India, and you see further integration between the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), the Belt and Road, the New Silk Road, and all of these Eurasian economic development and integration organizations.

What Helga Zepp-LaRouche said is that we have to now escalate our campaign here in the United States, for the United States to become fully committed and involved in this new dynamic of win-win cooperation and mutually beneficial development projects. She said, you have to stick to that issue; don’t get distracted by anything else. The world has completely changed. We’re in an entirely new epoch, a new era of civilization.

She said on the news that we’ve seen just over the last 24 hours, the fact that President Trump has nixed this Paris climate change agreement, she said, is a good thing. It’s not based on science. Yes, we know the climate is changing, but it’s not based on manmade, anthropogenic global warming. The question is, what is causing it? What this Paris agreement was based on was ideology, she said; it was based on the ideology of limits to growth, population reduction, the suppressing of development — especially in the Third World. You counter pose that to the New Silk Road, to the Belt and Road Initiative coming out of China, which is bringing much-desired economic development to the Third World, Africa, and other places; which they have not had access to for generations. You have to see that this is a real surge of optimism.

She said, keep things optimistic; stay optimistic. The artificial climate of discussion in the United States, which has been created by the news media, is purely propaganda, she said. The fake news is not only the negative reporting — we’ve seen plenty of that; but the fake news really is the failure to report the positive and optimistic developments that are occurring around the world, especially coming out of the Belt and Road Forum.

On that subject, we had the opportunity to have a ten-minute briefing from Mrs. Helga LaRouche yesterday during a conference call that she held with associates. It was a really wonderful and optimistic sort of reflection back on the impact and the effect of this Belt and Road Forum, which she had the opportunity to attend in person and to participate in. We produced a sort of video here for you, using some pictures of Helga’s visit to China and some background material that you’ll hear her go through in terms of the 40-50-year history of the fight of the LaRouche movement for this new international economic order, which is now coming into being. So, here’s that ten-minute video for you.

[start video]

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Well, I just wanted to make sure that you get a first impression from me from my trip, because I think the worst mistake we could make would be to respond to the absolutely incredible psywar propaganda coming from the U.S. mainstream media and the neoliberal media in Europe, like Spiegel Online with its Chief Editor piece which was really out of this way! It is very clear that people who are primarily relying on such media have a completely, totally, 100% wrong idea of what the reality is of what’s going on. And we should really get that out of our heads and not try to swim within the fishbowl of an artificially created environment. Because, from my standpoint, the world looks very, very different.

First of all, I said this already, and I reiterate it: With the Belt and Road Forum, the world has dramatically consolidated the beginning of the new era, and I don’t think at all, that short of World War III, this is going to go away, because the majority of the world is moving in a completely liberated way. And first of all, this was the highest level conference I ever participated in. There were 28 head of state, speaking one after the other, and obviously, the speech by Xi Jinping was absolutely outstanding, and whoever gas time to listen to it, should really do it, because it was a very, very Confucian speech, which set the tone for the two-day conference in a very clear way. So, please listen to it when you have some time.

I think the way people have to understand what is going on, you have to really think what this organization, and Lyn in particular did for the last almost 50 years. The first time when Lyn in 1971 recognized what the significance of the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system was, and then all the many, many things we did in the last over 40 years: Lyn coming back from the Iraq Ba’ath Party celebration in 1975, when he proposed the IDB as an International Development Bank to foster a new world economic order; the fact that we, for one year, campaigned with this IDB proposal which then basically became part of the Colombo, Sri Lanka resolution of the Non-Aligned Movement in ’76. Then, in the end of the ’70s, when we worked with Indira Gandhi on a 40-year development plan for India. Already in ’76, we published a whole book about the industrialization of Africa. We worked with Mexican President José López Portillo on “Operation Juárez.” We put out a 50-year Pacific Basic development plan. Lyn had already in ’75 had proposed Oasis Plan. And then naturally when the [berlin] Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, we proposed the Productive Triangle and the Eurasian Land-Bridge.

And all of these proposals! And just think of the many, many activities we did, conferences all over five continents, all of this was on the level of ideas, on the level of program — but only after Xi Jinping put the New Silk Road on the agenda in 2013, and in the four-years of breathtaking developments of the One Belt, One Road initiative since, these ideas are becoming realized! And the genie is out of the bottle!

When you have now the Bi-Oceanic Railway discussion and the tunnels and bridges connecting the Atlantic and Pacific around Latin America, you have all these railways now being opened up in Africa — this is unprecedented! This was not done by the IMF or the World Bank. They suppressed it with the conditionalities. But with the AIIB, the New Development Bank, the New Silk Road Fund, the Maritime Silk Road Fund, the direct investment of the Chinese Ex-Im Bank, the China state bank, all of these projects are now proceeding, and they have completely changed the attitude and the self-confidence of all participating countries.

Now, the way people in China look at President Trump is absolutely different than what the media are trying to say. They are very positive about Trump, in the same way that people in Russia think that Trump is somebody you can absolutely have a decent relationship with, and that is reality. And forget the media! Forget these whores in the press who are really just prostitutes for the British Empire. Don’t pay any attention to what they say, and don’t allow the people you are talking with to do that, either.

When Trump promised $1 trillion infrastructure investments, this was the right thing, and we put out the right program saying the United States must join the Silk Road and that should be our focus, and nothing else. Everything else should be a subsumed aspect of that. This is the strategically important thing, and the fact that the head of the China Investment Corp. Ding Xuedong said it’s not $1 trillion but $8 trillion, is what the United States needs, is absolutely on the mark; and you know it yourself from the conditions of the roads and the infrastructure in all of the United States.

So the fact that the same organization has now set up their office in New York, advising Chinese investors how to invest in the United States, and vice versa, how U.S. investors can invest in China; the fact that the Chinese are invited to participate in this infrastructure conference in June; all of this is absolutely going in the right direction.

What happened in the Belt and Road Forum and the many meetings I had afterwards — after all, I spent two full weeks in Beijing, in Nanjing, in Shanghai but it’s the fact that in the many interviews, many quotes, and the general view is that we were treated with the highest respect possible. I mean, people are fully aware of Lyn’s significance as a theoretician of physical economy, his ideas are highly respected; and people treated me as we should be treated, namely as people who have devoted their entire lives to the common good of humanity. And this is absolutely in stark contrast to the shitty behavior that we are normally getting from the neo-liberals in the trans-Atlantic region.

And you should understand that what the attack on Trump is supposed to do: Is to make — it’s so difficult for him to focus on the positive aspect, and there are quite some many of them, including his working relationship with Russia and China, which is strategically the most important. So that, basically, he has to defend himself instead, and everybody thinks they have to spend all the time to defend themselves.

So don’t fall for it. The idea that we are losing is completely off! Mankind is on the winning track and we have to pull the American population to create the kind of ferment so that the implementation of the infrastructure program as a first step is on the agenda, and on everybody’s mind and nothing else.

Even if Europe is still in the grip of the EU Commission, I mean, if Merkel wants to be the leader of the free West, — forget it. Macron just had a very excellent meeting with Putin, defining a cordial relationship with Russia! This is not what Merkel and Obama have been cooking up, when Obama addressed the church day of the Protestant church, but Merkel is pretty isolated.

Just look around in Europe: Macron send Raffarin, the former Prime Minister, to the Belt and Road Forum who gave an excellent speech, why China and France have to work together. Gentiloni from Italy said China and Italy will work together on the development of Africa. All the East Europeans, Tsipras [from Greece], Serbia, Hungary, Czechia’s Zeman, Orban [hungary] — all of these people were absolutely enthusiastic on the Belt and Road Initiative. And now even Germany, it shows that the German industry is actually really getting it, that their interest is to work on joint ventures in third countries together with China. So I think even Germany will change.

I have the strong conviction that by the end of this year, it will look completely different, because the development perspective is so contagious, that I think all the efforts by the British Empire to somehow throw in a monkey wrench will not work! So take the winning perspective, take the high ground, think strategically: And realize that what is happening in reality, in many, many development projects around the world, is what this organization has been fighting for, for almost half a century.

I just wanted to tell you that, because the worst thing we could do, is look at it from inside the United States, from within the box, when the whole world has moved out of the box decisively, with the Belt and Road Forum, which is not going to be stopped by anything. And that is my view I wanted to communicate.

OGDEN: As you could hear, Helga LaRouche was extremely optimistic after spending an entire two weeks in China; and her point could not be more clear. The United States must join the Silk Road; this must be our focus and nothing else. “Everything else should be a subsumed aspect of that,” she said; “this is the strategically most important thing.”

Helga also had, among many media interviews, you could see some pictures there from her interview on the “Dialogue with Yang Rui” show, which was a very widely watched and wonderful interview. She had many TV interviews, many other press interviews. Here’s an interview that just came out; this is from Shanghai Daily, and I’m going to read a few excerpts from that interview as well. I think is just really a nice overview. As you can see, the title is “Belt and Road Initiative Instills Hope for Peace and Development Among Nations.” You can see the picture of Helga LaRouche there. The editor’s note begins the article; it says,

“Helga Zepp-LaRouche visited Shanghai for the first time in the summer of 1971. In 1977 she married American economist Lyndon LaRouche, and the couple have since worked together on development plans for a just new world economic order.” That was the overview that we saw in the video just now. It goes on:

“Zepp-LaRouche founded the Schiller Institute in 1984, a think tank devoted to the realization of these plans and a renaissance and a dialogue of classical cultures.

“She is an expert in European humanist philosophy and poetry, Confucius, and history.

These are going to be a few excerpts from Helga LaRouche’s answers to the questions that were posed to her in this Shanghai Daily interview.

So, Helga said: “I think the Belt and Road initiative signifies a revolutionary move to a new epoch of civilization. The idea of having a win-win cooperation among nations is the first time that a concrete concept has been offered to overcome geopolitics.

“Since geopolitics was the cause of the two world wars, I think it is a completely new paradigm of thinking where an idea proposed by one country has the national interest basically in coherence with the interests of humanity as a whole. This has never happened.

“This has instilled tremendous hope among developing nations that they have the chance to overcome poverty and underdevelopment. And I think this is an initiative that will grow until all the continents are connected through infrastructure and development.” (That’s the idea of the World Land-Bridge.)

“We have always made the point that for this new Silk Road to succeed in the tradition of the old Silk Road, which was also an exchange of ideas and cultures, not just products and technology, you have to combine economic cooperation with dialogue between cultures. This dialogue must be on the highest level, so each culture has to present example of the best of their culture, like Confucianism, Italian renaissance, the German classical period, and present the best works of arts in music and poetry, paintings and other forms of art.

“Our experience is that when people get into contact for the first time with expression of such high culture from another culture, they are surprised by its beauty. And this beauty then opens the heart and souls of the people. And this is the best medicine against chauvinism, xenophobia, and prejudice, and it opens the way for the love of other cultures.

“This is in conformity with Confucian teaching that all activity must be combined with strengthening of love for the mankind, because without that cultural component, that new Silk Road will not flourish.”

“I think it a great honor for me to participate in this Belt and Road Forum, and I was deeply impressed by the speech of President Xi Jinping. Among all participants I spoke with there is consensus that we are actively participating in the shaping of history. All this means that China is right now leading the world in terms of providing the perspective for the future.

“I think this has been recognized by many countries in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, and even some European countries start to recognize it is in their best interests to ally with that initiative. So I think it has made clear that China is the only country right now that offers a positive perspective to overcome the strategic bottleneck of our present times.”

“Here I would like to quote from Pope Paul VI who said that ‘Development is the new name for peace.'”

“I was first in Shanghai 46 years ago in 1971, after traveling on a cargo ship. Although it was not the best time to be in China, it had awoken my love for China.

“I think the Chinese people are much too modest. They should feel more confident about what they have accomplished. They have created the biggest miracle of the world, even bigger than the post-war German economic miracle. They should be very proud to be Chinese.”

So again, that was from an interview in Shanghai Daily called “Belt and Road Initiative Instills Hope for Peace and Development Among Nations.” [http://www.shanghaidaily.com/opinion/chinese-perspectives/ Belt-and-Road-initiative-instills-hope-for-peace-and-development -among-nations/shdaily.shtml]

Obviously, this is just a wonderfully optimistic view of the world right now. I think it gives you a sense of what Helga LaRouche gained as an eyewitness and participant on the ground at the Belt and Road Forum. It’s what Americans are not being given; we’re not being given this kind of optimistic perspective of what the future of mankind could be, and it’s very much within our grasp. The kind of pride that she said Chinese should feel about being Chinese, this is something that Americans desperately to access again; this pride of being American.

With that kind of overview and our very clear sense of what our mission is, that the United States should join this New Paradigm of win-win development, I think maybe Ben can give us a little bit of a sense of what it’s going to take to get the United States back on this path to development. It’s been 50 years since the assassination of John F Kennedy and the departure of the United States from this sense of development and progress. This embrace of this Malthusianism, zero-growth kind of population control ideology, which has brought us to the point of just miserable economic suffering.

BENJAMIN DENISTON: As you mentioned in the beginning, Trump’s announcement that the U.S. is going to pull out of this Paris climate change agreement is a really big deal; this is excellent. To my knowledge, unless I’m missing something, since this whole climate change scare got going, this is the first U.S. President who has actually kicked back against this. It started really back with George H.W. Bush; Bill Clinton went along with it. Despite the narrative of it being a Republican versus Democrat issue, the George W Bush administration was fully on board; they went with all this junk. Bio-fuels, global warming, they pushed it fully. Obama pushed it further. Now, we finally have a President who is actually kicking back against this. This is huge, this important; Trump definitely deserves respect and support for fighting against this thing. As many of our viewers know, this is a huge global lobby that’s been pushing this thing from the top down for decades now.

I thought it was also important that Trump highlighted the economic effects of this. Some people just say the science says this, or the science says that; but there’s also the reality of what is the effect on the people. What’s the effect on your citizens of going with these policies? They say CO2 is terrible, it’s a pollutant, etc.; therefore, we need to go with all these wonderful, clean energy solutions. They paint this rosy picture, when in fact, that has devastating effects on the real-life conditions of our population. This whole Green energy fraud is ridiculous. Given that this issue is now coming up, I think it’s worth just highlighting a couple of points on this.

If you want to talk about the reduction in CO2 emissions and the Green energy stuff, I still think it’s worth looking at what Germany is facing right now in terms of their energy prices. If you want a case study in what wind and solar and exiting nuclear and getting rid of coal and natural gas does; in Germany, just between 2004 and 2015, their energy prices went up 50% from $0.23 cents a kilowatt-hour in U.S. values, to $0.35 cents a kilowatt-hour. They were already in 2004, twice the rate we pay in the U.S. on average. And over that ten-year period, in the context of a lot of this nuclear exit, CO2-reduction stuff, they went up another 50% to now three times what Americans pay on average for energy, just as an example of what that means for real life conditions. This has been driving industries to leave Germany, so it has an effect on industry, other forms of economic activity as well.

In 2013, just one subsidy — this major surcharge they added to the average German’s bill to pay for wind and solar — was the equivalent of $0.07 U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour. That alone is 60% of what we pay on average for the U.S.; just for one subsidy, just for wind and solar.

In the context of all the propaganda that gets put out, it’s worth emphasizing the idea that we can transition to some wonderful world powered by wind, solar electricity is a face; it’s a fraud. We need to go in the other direction. To the degree necessary, use coal, use natural gas, whatever; but move towards more advanced higher forms of energy like fission and nuclear fusion — that’s really the future. The future is increasing energy use per capita, increasing the use of higher qualities of energy per capita, not reduction.

I also think it’s worth in the context of the debate re-erupting right now, people are freaking out about Trump doing this; I think it’s worth re-examining the issue of CO2. What does CO2 do? It’s now officially labelled a pollutant by the EPA. There are all these horror stories about extreme weather, climate change, etc.

I just want to highlight one graphic [Fig. 1]. Tons could be said, but I think it’s just worth it for the education of our audience and the real facts on the issue, it’s worth just highlighting this study, comparing literally dozens of different computer models on the effects of CO2 increase with the reality that’s happened just in the last couple of decades. So, what these people did was to take 32 different computer models, all claiming what the effects of CO2 increase were going to do to the global temperature. Those are all the variety of small dotted lines rising up in the graph there. The thick red line there is the average of all of these 32 different computer models.

If you take the claims being made by these models and by these fear-mongers around the CO2, they say this is the type of rate of temperature increase you’re going to get. But if you compare that to the actual observations indicated below in the blue and green lines with the squares and the dots, you see that none of the computer models have been accurate in reality. Both satellite measurements by two different types of measurements, as well as independent in situ measurements with balloon systems, have shown that the temperature over the past 15 years now on average, has been relatively flat with little increase. None of the models showed this; none of them.

So, have this in mind when you hear these scare stories about this much temperature rise is going to cause this much extreme weather, etc. They’re basing it all on these models that have already shown to be ridiculous.

There’s another interesting aspect to the CO2 issue, which isn’t discussed at all, which is this apparently secret thing that many of these fear-mongering people around climate change don’t apparently know, which is that CO2 is actually a part of the biosphere, and it’s actually an important part of the ecological cycle. People talk about being “pro-green”: It’s actually an important contribution to green on the planet.

And there’s been some work done, and I’d like to play a few short clips of an interview I’d done a few weeks back with a scientist who’s led a great amount of effort on studying the positive effects of higher CO2 levels. This is Dr. Craig Idso, and he has spent many years and a lot of effort doing actual experiments with greenhouses, overviews of various studies, overviews of satellite measurements, and actually studying the question of what is the effect of increasing CO2 levels on plant growth and then also on agricultural activity. These clips speak for themselves, but I think this is an important part of the discussion, as being completely blacked out, which is, aside from the scare-stories about CO2 not being grounded in reality, there’s actually a beneficial side for increasing CO2 levels.

[start video]

DR. CRAIG IDSO: There are three main benefits from increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere: The first is that it increases plant productivity for biomass of the plant. On average, what we see is that for a doubling of CO2, something that’s going to happen by the end of this century, most are basis plants, non-woody plants like crops and things like that, will experience anywhere from a 25% to a 55% increasing in biomass per yield. And that’s a phenomenal result and that’s something that’s going to happen just because we raise the CO2 concentration and nothing else.

Second is that higher CO2 concentrations help increase the plant’s water use efficiency. Again, a doubling of CO2 allows plants to use about half as much water as they need to produce the same amount of tissue, so another phenomenal benefit.

And then the third benefit is that higher CO2 concentrations helps to ameliorate environmental stresses. So if you have a stress from hot air temperature, maybe low light, low levels of soil fertility, those sorts of things, when you have higher CO2 concentrations they tend to reduce or lessen that stress if not completely ameliorate it, under a doubling of CO2.

You put all those three benefits together, and what you get is a tremendous benefit to the biosphere to the growth. And we’re seeing that already: We see it in tree-ring cores, you can look and look at how their water use efficiency has improved over time, and we see anywhere from 35% to 40% increase already, as the CO2 concentration has increased by about 40%. So the satellites have been up measuring reflectivity of vegetation, over the entire globe ever since about the early 1980s. And what they find consistently, whether they’re focussing on a particular region of the globe or the globe as a whole, you get anywhere from about 6% to 15% increase in biomass in that period of time. The globe as a whole, or in total, is actually in a better off condition now than it was when those measurements began.

I did the first approximation to determine what is the net monetary benefit on crop production globally, in the past and then also projected into the future, and what I found was that over the 50-year period from 1961 to 2011, it amounts to about $3.2 trillion on the global economy, a phenomenal benefit. And then, projecting that forward in time, as the CO2 concentration is going to continue to rise, from about 2012 to 2050, we expect it to be about $10 trillion to the economy.

And that’s just really scratching the surface, because you could look at studies, for example, I’ll take rice, where there’s a number of genotypes of rice, and scientists have looked at for example, in one study I’m thinking of, they looked at 16 different genotypes of rice, and how those genotypes responded to a doubling of CO2, and they received values that ranged from about 0 all the way to a whopping 265%. So, if governments and scientists focussed on those specific genotypes that we received the greatest increase in biomass per CO2 rise, and then grew them, we could have this phenomenal increase in agriculture and have no problem in feeding the planet in the future.

[end video]

DENISTON: I wanted to just highlight that interview, because that needs to get out. These are astounding facts: You compare on the one side, the scare stories are not adding up. On the other side, just review what he said, that over the past 35 years, according to global satellite measurements a 6-15% increase in total biomass production to the planet, the entire planet! We’re not talking about a 10th of a percent of a half of a percent, 6-15%, that’s huge. And these assessments they’ve done on the increased crop yield, which they put in monetary terms of $3 trillion increased value production from higher crop yields. Again, these are not models and studies; you can take a greenhouse, you can study tomato plants, this particular species, what’s their yield under regular atmospheric CO2 conditions, what’s their yield under this much increase? And they have hard data on this, so these are not models, this is real stuff.

And then the other irony, which is an irony for some people is this water use efficiency: You actually get a highly significant boost for certain plant species in their ability to produce more biomass with less water use, and this has rather interesting implications for drier regions in particular, where water becomes a limiting factor in plant growth. And now, all of a sudden, with higher concentrations of plant food in the atmosphere, CO2, they can grow in regions they couldn’t grow in before; they can be more healthy in regions they couldn’t be healthy before. And you just take a look at places we’ve had water issues — California — and we have our crazy governor in California, running around pretending he’s the world leader on CO2, when his state is actually benefitting greatly from the fact there’s been higher CO2 levels in the context of the recent droughts. The ironies are just all over the place.

You’ve really got to ask yourself, why are none of these just basic scientific facts even being added into the discussion? All you hear is these super, extreme, incredible flimsy arguments claiming to be science, about scare stories, and then basic, raw, scientific data and studies and discussion — you don’t hear about that in the media, at all. I think people need to let that irony sink in, on this whole climate debate issue.

And Matthew, as you said in the beginning, the real issue is there’s an ideology behind this, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche said in our discussion earlier today: The whole climate change issue is not really about climate change. That’s the latest scare story certain people have grabbed onto and pushed from the standpoint of a Malthusian ideology. And tons can be said; we put out an entire report, “Global Warming Scare Is Population Reduction, Not Science.” This was put out by Executive Intelligence Review; if you don’t have a copy of this, you should get one. [http://store.larouchepub.com/category-s/1840.htm] Under Mr. LaRouche’s direction, over decades, his organization has uniquely put out the entire story of the origins of this, not just climate-change scare, but more broadly this whole environmentalist movement as coming from this Malthusian ideology.

And you look at the founders of the modern environmentalist movement, if you look at who these people were, these are people that created the entire structure that pushed globally this whole environmentalist system. We can just highlight some of the key figures: Sir Julian Huxley, a lifelong proponent of eugenics, head of the British Eugenics Society. After World War II, after Hitler’s horrific war crimes, and crimes against humanity were exposed, and the connection to eugenics there, Huxley still promoted eugenics in his position in the UN, as the head of UNESCO at the time.

Prince Philip, whenever he gets the chance, talks about how terrible population growth is, and the fact that population growth is the number one problem on the planet. The guy whose said if he could be reincarnated, he’d like to come back as a deadly virus to reduce world population. That’s his view, that’s his belief-system.

Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, who was actually working with Nazi intelligence, a member of the Nazi Party. He even helped Nazi war criminals escape after World War II. These people came together and started the environmentalist movement, going back to the immediate post-World War II period, and going into the ’50s and ’60s when it started to take off.

This is the ideology behind this. It’s not about the debates you see on the media, about this claim or that claim on supposed science of CO2. If you really want to understand the issue, it’s this oligarchical, Malthusian ideology that’s been campaigning for generations against economic development, against population growth, against the development of so-called Third World nations. These are people who have said we cannot allow the world to rise to the living standards of America and the West. Think of Obama travelling to Africa, telling students in Africa, if you all had air conditioning and cars the planet would boil over, so that’s not an option.

And that’s the issue. I think what Helga said, in response to Trump’s pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, is, that’s the issue. This is an expression of the old Malthusian, geopolitical paradigm, and what we’re seeing emerging with everything around this Belt and Road Forum summit, everything that you just went through, Matthew, is the future. That’s the future. So Trump’s dumping this climate change thing is completely coherent with the idea of the United States bucking this past, geopolitical, zero sum game, Malthusian ideology, and getting towards building the future again.

And I would say, from our work, the next steps in the energy issue is going hard with fusion, nuclear fission as needed along the way. But the key is not only cheap energy, in using coal, natural gas, etc., but what are the future energy sources that are going to allow not only nations around the world to come up to the same energy use that we have in the U.S. now, but even higher levels and including in the U.S. How can we actually increase the total energy-flux density of the global economy in totality? That’s the future. The entire history of the development of mankind has always been intimately connected with and tied to these kinds of increases in energy-flux density. That’s got to be the next step in this thing.

OGDEN: I think that idea, the increases in energy-flux density is the key. It unlocks the entire mystery of this whole discussion. If you go back to that history that Helga Zepp-LaRouche walked us through, about the 40, 45-year history of the LaRouche movement’s fight for a new, international economic order, that was paralleled by a 45-year history of a fight against this kind of Malthusianism, the idea of “limits to growth” and overpopulation and these kinds of things that have become ingrained.

This was paralleled, in fact, we saw all those reports about the great development of India, the development of the Pacific Basin, the development of Africa, the development of Latin America, all of these reports mapping out a blueprint for the development of the planet; but also, there was a book that was published, called There Are No Limits to Growth! And this was a book by Mr. LaRouche [1983] and it is rooted so deeply in his unique approach to economic science, the idea that, no, in fact, we are not living in a closed system. This is not a closed economic system, this is not even a closed biological system, but that in fact, the very fact that mankind has a voluntary, creative capability as a species, allows mankind to move into progressively higher and more efficient economic systems. Because we’re not based on one sort of limited resources regime.

And we’ve seen this throughout history: If you just take the empirical view of human history, mankind has progressively moved from one resource base to another resource base, through discoveries, through new technologies, and each one of those resource bases is defined by a higher energy-flux density, more powerful forms of “fire,” as you could call it, a Promethean idea of what mankind is capable of.

You take that idea of economics, and this is really Mr. LaRouche’s unique contribution, and you say: OK, the fact that that debunks the entire idea of limited resources, that very fact itself overthrows the entire idea which has been at the basis of geopolitics for at least the last 50 years. What was the justification for saying, “no we have to limit the access of these countries in the Third World to these limited resources, so that the developed countries — the United States, Western Europe — can have access to them?” This was literally the basis of our national security strategy in the 1970s and the 1980s. But when you say, there’s no such thing as “limited resources,” it overthrows that entire idea of geopolitics.

And I think that really serves as the scientific basis for a new idea of “win-win” cooperation, as counterposed to the idea of a zero-sum game, where, if some countries win that means other countries lose. No. In fact, all countries can win and development is an unlimited potential.

DENISTON: I don’t think it can be stressed enough, this is an entire paradigm shift we’re talking about. I think Helga’s point about this being the end of the geopolitical perspective, people have to realize that’s what’s on the table. And that’s why it’s so important she came back from China with this report. Because we have to get Americans to understand the depth of this revolution that’s happening right now, and the importance of the United States jumping on board with this, immediately. Because this is a historic shift: If you get the United States onboard now with Russia and China and the nations allied with them, that’s it. We can have the future, we can create the future we want with that alliance. The British will be forced to go along with that global alliance — they can put up as much of a fight as they can, as we’re seeing, with this crazy propaganda campaign in the United States, but people have to realize how vulnerable the British Empire actually is, and that we have this perspective before us. Because this has happened, this is moving right now

OGDEN: OK! Wonderful. I think that what Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s point was, stands: The United States must join the New Silk Road. This is the primary strategic focus and everything else must be subsumed, as subsumed factor of that. This is our focus, and nothing else.

So we need to escalate that campaign, obviously, and watch for very dramatic and rapid developments around the globe!

Thank you very much, Ben, for joining me here in the studio today, and thank you all for tuning. That’s the conclusion to our broadcast today: Please stay tuned to larouchepac.com. We’ll make that video that we showed you earlier, of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s remarks available as a standalone, and your task for this weekend is to spread that around as far as you can.